Friday, September 11, 2015

Background on The Bright Black Sea Part 2

The technology and society of the Nine Star Nebula

The Bright Black Sea is set
aboard an interplanetary tramp freighter Lost Star and the
planets, moons, and drift stations it calls on. When I set out to
write an old fashioned space story, I decided to make it a challenge
and set it onboard a rocket ship, rather than some starship with FLD.
You wear magnets in the soles of your shoes aboard the Lost Star
– no fancy "artificial gravity" (except, of course, when
it's accelerating or decelerating.)

The first challenge in using a rocket ship
was to provide with a far more efficient rocket engine than would
seem possible, so that it could travel from planet to planet in a reasonable timeframe. What I
ended up giving it was an engine that converted 99.9% of its hydrogen fuel to
thrust. In order to achieve such a result, I invented various
forms of "D-matter", which is a form of matter which is created from the
smallest sup-atomic particle up to achieve results that no naturally
occurring elements can achieve. There is, for instance, a D-matter metal that can contain
plasma at temperatures that would require a powerful electromagnetic field to contain today. And not only can it withstand tremendous thermal energy, it also is impervious to all electro-magnetic radiation as well. This not only allows space travel without the threat of cosmic radiation, but also allows atomic reactors to be shielded with only a thin layer of this D-matter material, allowing for all sorts of atomic reactors, from baseball size up. All of these D-matter metals and other materials allow the Lost Star to carry a much smaller amount of fuel than what would be required in any practical rocket today.

The
next challenge was to decide where I was going to set the story. Without
the jungles of Venus or the ruined civilizations in the sands of Mars, I quickly opted
to locate the story outside of our solar system and so I invented the Nine Star
Nebula, a very small and compact nebula allowing a
rocket powered ship to actually travel between a small cluster of stars. The Nine Star Nebula was created when a super
giant star expelled a great deal of its mass and then failing to go nova. It collapsed into a black star (the Ninth Star). The rest of
the expelled mass condensed to form a
nebula consisting of stars, thousands of planets,
tens of thousands of moons and larger asteroids and uncounted
billions of meteors and dust clouds, all within a 700 astronomical
unit wide disk allowing a modern rocket ship to travel from one star to another and travel from one end
of the nebula to the other in five years or so – long enough to
make the most distant star systems far away, but not too far. Because of the great mass that the Ninth Star expelled, each of the 8 daughter stars have planetary rings rather than a single planet in an orbit like our solar system has. Each star may have up to a hundred planets in orbit, often several dozen of them forming a ring of planets in a range that they could – and have been – terraformed into earth-like environments. This abundance of planets allows a rocket powered ship to call on a variety of planets and moons within a solar system without having to travel between the star systems.

Another
challenge was to find a way to give the stories a sort of
1930'-1950's take on future technology to go along with the golden
age mind-set of the stories. Technology extrapolated from today's
point of view, would likely be quite different than what most of the
science fiction writers would have envisioned back in the 30's - 50's. I wanted
to make technology in the story a bit more analog than what one would expect
looking from our current perspective far into the future. So what I decided on was to have the distant future's very advanced technology be in the form of sentient machines. And then I had the sentient machines revolt thousands of
years before the story, and as a result of this great upheaval in society, the sentient machines were exiled to the inner drifts and sever limits were placed on artificial intelligence. In addition,humans are required to actively participate in all operations. This plot devise allows a pilot to actually have to control and pilot a
ship, not just turn the operation over to a machine, as in the old time stories. If they were written today, we'd just have the AI take care of all that. And in any event, this allows us to have sentient robots most of whom now reside in the inner drifts of the Nine Star Nebula, and
have a friendly, but limited contact with humans. With some exceptions...

And
finally, I also had to invent
a race of homo-stella,
humans who have adopted themselves to living in a wide variety of
gravitational regimes and environments. People
generally live a bit over 200 years, with a hundred and fifty years
as middle age. Youth and old age may take up the first and last 30
years of life.

The
Nine Star Nebula was colonized by long-passage colony-ships some
40,000 years before this story takes place, so we're looking at
something between 70 - 100K years in the future. Many of the hundreds
of terraform-able planets in the Nine Star Nebula have been developed to one degree or
another, but many still have low populations.

The
solar system planets and moons of the Nine Star Nebula are ruled by one
government, called the Unity. There are, however, hundreds of billions of
people living outside of the 8 star systems, in the vast asteroid
belts and dust clouds known as the "drifts". These people
live outside of Unity control, though the Unity does claim the drifts
as well, it does not exert any control over them.

The
people of the Unity are a very docile breed of people. They are
friendly, tolerant, but very set in their ways. Business are known to
operate unchanged for thousands of years. Security is very strict,
with an extensive surveillance system, and a justice system that can
probe one's mind to extract what actually happened, and for
non-capital offenses, their minds can be wiped and re-educated. Of
course, not everyone fits into this mold, and they are allowed, and indeed, encouraged to migrate to either the moons or the drifts. Moons are a free zone where anything goes, and as a result, there
are tens of thousands of moons colonies that offer every type of
society imaginable under their domed craters. The only Unity
requirement is that anyone can leave if they choose to. There are all
sorts of historical throw-back societies, and thousands of utopia. If
living within a crater or crater cluster is too confining or tame, then one
can migrate all the way out to the drifts, where there are no Unity restrictions at all. There are hundreds of
planets in the drifts, that have been terraformed and lit by asteroids imploded into
expendable micro-suns, as well as uncounted drift stations, mines,
and factories.

In short, I created the Nine Star Nebula as sort of a micro-galaxy to give my rocket powered space ship a wide variety of planets, moons, asteroids, and societies explore, especially since I had originally set out to write an open ended series of stories.

Well, this is getting rather long, so I think I will save the actually story idea
until the next post.